Books like How to Change Your Mind

01

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Yuval Noah Harari · History

Sapiens traces the full arc of human history from the emergence of Homo sapiens in Africa roughly 70,000 years ago to the present.

A kindred science read.

02

Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

Sam Harris · Religion & Spirituality

Waking Up is Sam Harris' argument that the insights of contemplative traditions — particularly Buddhism's claim that the sense of self is an illusion — can be separated from religious metaphysics and investigated directly through meditation and introspection.

Shares consciousness and spirituality with How to Change Your Mind.

03

The Body Keeps the Score

Bessel van der Kolk · Psychology

The Body Keeps the Score is Bessel van der Kolk's account of four decades spent studying and treating trauma, from Vietnam veterans at the VA in the 1970s to survivors of childhood abuse, accidents, and domestic violence.

Both dig into neuroscience.

04

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman · Psychology

Thinking, Fast and Slow is Daniel Kahneman's account of the two cognitive systems that govern human thought.

A kindred science read.

05

How to Create a Mind

Ray Kurzweil · Science

Ray Kurzweil's central claim in How to Create a Mind is that the neocortex — the part of the brain responsible for higher thought — operates on a single repeating algorithm called the pattern recognition theory of mind.

Shares consciousness and neuroscience with How to Change Your Mind.

06

The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human

V. S. Ramachandran · Science

The Tell-Tale Brain is V.

Shares consciousness and neuroscience with How to Change Your Mind.

07

Why We Sleep

Matthew Walker · Science

Why We Sleep is Matthew Walker's attempt to do for sleep what no amount of public health messaging has managed: make people genuinely afraid of what they're losing.

Shares neuroscience and mental health with How to Change Your Mind.

08

Consciousness Explained

Daniel C. Dennett · Philosophy

Consciousness Explained is Daniel Dennett's attempt to replace what he calls the Cartesian Theater — the intuitive picture of consciousness as a single unified stream of experience observed by a self — with a model he calls Multiple Drafts.

Shares consciousness and neuroscience with How to Change Your Mind.

09

Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain

Antonio Damasio · Psychology

Antonio Damasio is a neurologist at USC whose work challenges the centuries-old idea that reason and emotion are separate faculties, with reason the reliable guide and emotion the unreliable interference.

Shares consciousness and neuroscience with How to Change Your Mind.

10

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

David Eagleman · Psychology

David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Stanford who argues that the conscious self is a late, small, and largely uninformed participant in the brain's activity.

Shares consciousness and neuroscience with How to Change Your Mind.

11

Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind

V. S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee · Psychology

V.

Shares consciousness and neuroscience with How to Change Your Mind.

12

Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain

Lisa Feldman Barrett · Psychology

Lisa Feldman Barrett wrote this short book — genuinely short at under thirty thousand words — as an accessible introduction to seven core findings of modern neuroscience, each presented as a lesson that overturns something most people believe.

Shares consciousness and neuroscience with How to Change Your Mind.